shopping_list

predictive analytics are discoveries of micrological propensities that are not directly correlated with human understanding and affectivity and that do not by themselves cohere into clearly identifiable events (M. Hansen 2015, 111–12)

Whatever explanatory and causal value predictive analytics of large datasets have is, I suggest, ultimately rooted in this ontological transformation whereby probabilities are understood to be expressions of the actual propensity of things (M. Hansen 2015, 120)

patel_notes

'Every little bit helps':Tesco ClubCard

Humby, 1984

Tesco is the clear winner in the online grocery market, in fact it takes almost 50p of every £1 spent on food shopping on the internet. https://econsultancy.com/blog/64841-how-seo-helps-tesco-to-dominate-the-online-grocery-market/

People add to list

The advent of recommender systems

In everyday life, we rely on recommendations from other people. … Recommender systems augment this natural social process. In a typical recommender system, people provide recommendations as inputs, which the system then aggregates and directs to appropriate recipients. In some cases the primary transformation is in the aggregation; in others the system’s value lies in its ability to make good matches between the recommenders and those seeking recommendations.(Resnick and Varian 1997, 56)

Early e-commerce recommender system architecture

##   lhs             rhs                support confidence lift
## 6 {whole milk} => {other vegetables} 0.075   0.29       1.5 
## 5 {whole milk} => {rolls/buns}       0.057   0.22       1.2 
## 4 {whole milk} => {yogurt}           0.056   0.22       1.6 
## 2 {whole milk} => {root vegetables}  0.049   0.19       1.8 
## 1 {whole milk} => {tropical fruit}   0.042   0.17       1.6

Multiplicity will be called ‘closed’ when grasped by the numerical one, and ‘open’ when grasped by the vital One. Every multiplicity is the joint effectuation of the closed and open, but its ‘veritable’ multiple-being lies on the side of the open. (Badiou 2004, 72)

A concept of the open is substantially established once we possess a multiple such that the we dwell within it by taking the intersection of two elements, or the union of many elements as we wish (even an infinity of elements). In the other words, the intersection of two opens is an open, and any union whatsoever of opens remains open. (Badiou 2004, 73)

Straight to the checkout?

This means, to put it slightly differently, that surrounding any delimited predictive system is a larger field of data – what I elsewhere call a “surplus of sensibility” – that, viewed speculatively, indexes the causal efficacy of the total situation within which this delimited system operates. (Effectively, the latter gains its reliability from closing off this larger surplus of sensibility, thereby transforming an always excessive propensity into a [provisionally] closed dataset.) Because it affords data that exceed whatever any given predictive system might include, the data of the world’s causal efficacy – the data constituting its real potentiality – always and in principle facilitates knowledge that cannot be restricted to any particular agenda (M. B. N. Hansen 2015, 126–7)

Models

A/B testing

Realtime infrastructure and its limits

Basket similarity

propensity_matrix

• the constitutive incompleteness and openness of lists are very closely entangled with problems of social order under predictive conditions
• shopping lists have complex temporal-material structure, since they mix prediction, infrastructural constraints, the individual characteristics of list-makers, statistical validations, database architectures and above all the surplus sensibility associated with circulation of commodities.
• shopping lists undergoing a conversion experience as they become more probabilistic, but the idea that probabilities are the closed form of propensities does not account for the distribution of probabilities in relations between things, between people, between people and things, and between things and people.